O brave new world

This story came to me Sunday, through Twitter-pal UK Cop Humour, who usually tweets a lot of silly stuff. But this one is different.

Background: there have been a lot of cutbacks to frontline policing in the UK—I don’t know the details, but there have been huge numbers of tweets about it, and the basic research I’ve done indicates the usual: Parliament demands value for money, do more with less, etc. Same thing for fire and ambulance services, and public (NHS) hospitals.

(As an aside, and you can interpret the politics on your own, Parliament has also just voted themselves an 11% pay raise. This was their response to the continuing scandals about what they were claiming as expenses—well, if we can’t be reimbursed for theatre tickets, duck blinds and packets of crisps, then I need to make much more than £66,396 per year for a half-time job. And, Bob’s-yer-uncle, an extra £7300!)

You should read this story all the way through because you need to catch the tone, but the summary is that—apparently due to budgetary cutbacks—a local station in some unnamed city was deemed adequately staffed at four officers…to cover 12 square miles…on a Saturday night.

Listen—12 square miles in any British city is going to include double- or triple-digit numbers of bars, clubs, pubs, liquor stores and other venues that invite all kinds of troublemaking, so to declare minimally-acceptable staffing on a Saturday night as four officers is kind of eye opening to begin with.

But the story’s not about that—not directly, anyway. It’s about a cop being called out to the home of a 95-year-old woman, whom he calls Doris for purposes of narration (and I’m referring to the constable as “he” for purposes of narration, as well, since I don’t know his/her anatomical disposition), who needs an ambulance to take her to the hospital that discharged her only hours before. Doris had got up at 2100 to make a cup of tea, slipped, fallen and cracked her head. It took her four hours to drag herself to the phone to call 999; at the time of the call, no ambulance “could commit”, so they sent out one quarter of the available police, the only one not already involved in some action.

Once at the scene, our guy tried for two hours to get an ambulance to take Doris to hospital…a couple of miles away. He couldn’t move her for fear of breaking something—she’s 95, for pity’s sake, and he’s only got himself there. He couldn’t even get her sitting up without massive pain, so she lay on the floor until finally, at 0320, the paramedics arrived. It took these trained professionals 40 minutes to get her into their bus and stabilized for the journey.

Well, the bare bones of this story don’t do it justice, so you have to read the original. Because the anguish, the frustration, the helplessness and maybe some fear, are all evident in the cop’s account. Which, he points out, is going to repeat by some order of magnitude when they close down his station and move those four officers seven miles away. To save money.

(I’m sitting here wondering how many police stations or extra ambulances could be funded by the approximately £4.75M per year MP raises will amount to. But I understand we’re talking different pots of money. And nobody’s going to pry that dosh from the parliamentary fists. As with pols pretty much the world over, when it comes to money, they’ve got the grip of a pit bull.)

Now, here’s the thing that struck me about this: at age 95, Doris has survived the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, the General Strike of 1926, the Great Depression, World War II, post-war austerities that lasted through much of the 1950s, Thatcher and a whole raft of other things. This is obviously a woman with heart and nerve, even if her joints are rheumatic and her step a bit uncertain.

And the 1942 Beveridge report that led to post-war social changes in Britain was based on the notion that everyone had made sacrifices to defeat Nazism, and therefore the nation owed its citizens some basic things—housing, education, employment, healthcare. You can make the case that subsequent generations have taken the piss over this social contract, and God knows that the NHS is completely swamped and falling further behind every day.

But the Dorises of Britain fucking earned these services, including not being discharged from hospital if there was any question of her ability to care for herself (no intermediary care facility? WTF?), and to have an ambulance respond without having its metaphoric ankles chewed on for hours. By cops—so they knew the need was genuine. Even, as our narrator points out, deploying a pair of constables might at least have got Doris comfortable for that unconscionable wait.

As you know, I’m acutely aware of emergency services here in the Valley they call Silicon—every time the engines from Fire Station No. 4 roll I listen for any follow-on sirens on El Camino that might indicate there’s something really awful going on.

But it’s all awful; whenever these guys are called out, it’s always awful for someone. As the story of Doris and our lone, frustrated, helpless cop illustrates. So there’s just something fundamentally wrong about this situation.

I’m not talking about fairness—we all know that life isn’t fair. This is about a social contract made with people like Doris, which her elected government has reneged on; in fact, her elected government is pretending it doesn’t exist.

I understand that the budgetary problems didn’t show up last week; they’ve been building for decades. And there are multiple layers of causes and blah, blah, blah. And for all the people involved in the various melees, robberies, road accidents and whatnot that went on while our constable remained with Doris—really sorry your government thinks that four officers constitutes adequate staffing for a Saturday night.

Meanwhile, the Dorises of the country lie in pain on their floor, the constables are weeping (inside if not outright) at their inability to help, and Parliament is spending £65,000 to do up a couple of toilets for the House of Lords because what they have now isn’t befitting their status in the world.

O brave new world indeed that has such people in’t!